Thursday, May 26, 2011

Olly Moss recently had a show at Gallery 88 in Los Angeles. He made over 200 pop culture silhouettes, and a good portion of them were Disney related. He posted the majority of them on his blog. Here are a few of the Disney ones.

I told you they were awesome....

This one was titled "Life is like a Hurricane" and was priced at 1 Million Dollars.

He isn't Disney, but you know I love him!

I love Remy under the hat.

If you like these, go to his blog (which is where I took these pictures from) and look at the rest. It's amazing how you can recognize the character just by their silhouette.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Okay, in our last installment I told you about the College Program housing system. Today I'm going to tell you about where I worked, but first a little bit more about housing. I found this map of Vista Way while doing some scanning last night.

Vista Way has 40 apartment buildings, the only one not occupied by CP's in number 26, which is where you could take college courses (if you sign up for them, and if your school accepts them). Each building has 12 apartments, 4 on each floor. Each apartment has 6 CP's (except the 4 on third floor that only have 4). This comes out to 24 CP's on the first and second floors, and 16 on the third, making 64 per building. Multiply that by the 39 apartment buildings and you have about 2,496 CP's living at Vista Way. Remember, Disney has two other apartment complexes, so CP's make up a pretty good chunk Cast Members.

Anyway, back to our story. Ralf and I had just selected our housing option, it was time to find our our roles (Disney's term for job). Ralf went first, and was told he would be working Magic Kingdom ODF (Out Door Foods). A pretty sweet gig, it's the Magic Kingdom!

The volunteer pulled my file and said "Oh, your going to love this, but you have to get a hearing test first!" I was rolodex-ing through my brain trying to think of where on Disney property I would be working that would require a hearing test. Since Ralf and I had been hired at the same time and was working Magic Kingdom, I thought my odds of also getting the MK were pretty good. Turns out I was wrong. "You will be working at The Missing Link Sausage Company!" Ralf and I both blurted out "WHAT?" at the same time. The Missing Link Sausage Company? What is that? Where is that? Then he dropped the second bomb on me, The Missing Link Sausage Company was located on Pleasure Island. Ralf laughed, I was horrified.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that The Missing Link was the smallest restaurant on Walt Disney World property (it was torn down a few years ago). Here's a PI map to show you exactly where it was.

The Link is number 17 on this map, it was across from 8 Trax. What's funny about this map is that the area they are claiming is The Missing Link is actually three places. The Link was sandwiched between two gift shops.

Like I said before, the place was tiny. Name me another WDW restaurant that is run by two people Monday through Thursday. This meant that when one person went on break you'd end up doing everything yourself. You would ring up the orders then walk down to the grill and cook it.

The Link was set up like a shoe box, on the far end from the door was the register, and the end closest to the door was the grill. This could cause traffic jams late at night when the drunks would stumble in and not know where to go. The Link also had what appeared to be (but wasn't) a walk up window. Drunks would also stumble up to it, knock and try to order.

This is Dan at the grill, check out the costume we wore!

There were a lot of perks to working at The Link though, the first being it was rarely busy. We would have a few rushes a night, but for the most part it was a pretty chill job. The Link also did not open until 7 p.m. This meant I did not have to go into work until 6. I could sleep till noon and still have time to go to the Magic Kingdom before work. Going in late also means getting home late. We would usually be out by 1:30, but our hours were 6-2. All of my roommates would be asleep when I got home and at work when I woke up.

The Link had 3 managers who also worked at Cirque Du Soleil, so a few times a month I would work at Cirque as a backer for the concession stand. Obviously not the best roles on property, but definitely not the worst. I know some of you might think "Who cares dude?" I had to tell you these stories first to set up my CP back ground. Believe me, I have some good College Program Tales coming. So stay tuned for the next installment.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

I've been a busy bumble bee, so I have not had much time to post. I've decided to make up for it by posting some pictures of everyone favorite extinct attraction, Horizons. Im pretty sure if you polled Disney's fans asking what attraction they want back, Horizons would win by a landslide. It's was an imagineering marvel. Anyway, lets look at some pictures.

(This is from Space Ship Earth...womp womp) Thanks Hoot.

One Man's Dream currently has this robot from Horizons on display, and an original Figment!

What do you think we can do to convince Disney to create a Horizons 2.0?

Thursday, May 5, 2011

One of my first posts was about my Pee-wee Herman bike. I bought a rusty vintage Schwinn on ebay a few years and wanted to fix it up like Pee-wee's. I soon realized that finding Pee-wee's tiger siren would be the hardest part of all. You'd think that it would be easy to locate given sites like ebay and Craig's List. Well, the tiger siren is harder to find than you'd think. There are bike forums online where people try to track them down. In fact I've only seen two on ebay in the past two years (and one went for over $700).

If you are not familiar with the siren, here's what it looks like.

Here it is on Pee-wee's bike on the movie poster.

This is where things get tricky. That bike is not the bike from the movie. It's missing all of the gadgets. The siren on this bike isn't even the same siren from the film. The original siren has a jewel on the tiger's forehead. Check out this screen shot from the film.

Not only is the jewel missing, but the tiger is painted differently. So, even if you buy the original siren you have to modify it if you want it to look just like Pee-wee's. Well, I had all but given up on finding one, until I met Jack.

Jack makes replica tiger sirens and occasionally sells them on ebay. After losing an auction I emailed Jack to see if he had anymore he would be auctioning off soon. He told me that he would custom make me one! Of course I jumped all over that. Jack actually has the original siren, he uses it to make a mold for his replicas. He even took the jewel off so his sirens look just like Pee-wee's!

Here she is:

The siren works too!

There you have it kids, I'm one step closer to a finished Pee-wee bike. Next I have to figure out those saddle bags....